Election Law Expert Tells Dan Abrams He’s ‘100%’ Certain Trump’s Mail-in Voting Executive Order Will Be Blocked

Election law expert David Becker told Mediate founder Dan Abrams that President Donald Trump’s latest executive order on mail-in voting is doomed on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s The Dan Abrams Show.

Trump signed the order, which charges the Department of Homeland Security with creating a “state citizenship list,” prohibits the Postal Service from distributing mail-in or absentee ballots to those not on it, and directs the U.S. attorney general to prosecute state officials who distribute ballots to non-citizens, on Tuesday.

On Thursday, Abrams asked Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, “What do you make of the chances that this executive order will survive legal challenges?”

“Yeah, you’ve done all the heavy lifting here. You laid it out very, very clearly. The Article I Section 4 was drafted by the Framers specifically to grant primary authority to regulate elections to the states, to the state legislatures. It also gave the authority to Congress to act directly, but one entity it didn’t give any authority whatsoever to was the President of the United States. And that was intentional. They would just fought a war against a monarch, against an authoritarian. And if you read the Constitution throughout, one of the threads that runs throughout the entire Constitution are the limits on executive power. That was something the Framers were very concerned about. And they carved elections out, especially for that, in the very first article of the Constitution,” answered Becker, who continued:

And so the states can always regulate elections. Congress can chime in when it needs to. It has done so a few times on things like the Voting Rights Act, on the National Voter Registration Act. It has not passed the SAVE Act or the SAVE America Act, And it’s very, very unlikely to pass that. So those-, that is where the power to regulate elections lies. And it appears the president here has not learned the lesson from that first executive order you mentioned, which he signed almost exactly a year ago. Which didn’t go quite as far as this, It sought to dictate policy on things like when mail ballots could be received, whether people had to show proof of citizenship before they voted, and even what voting machines could be used in elections. It tried to dictate that policy. That has been blocked by three courts in three different jurisdictions. It has no effect. And similarly here, to get to the core of your question, there have already been multiple lawsuits filed against this in less than about 36 hours. This is going to be blocked very, very quickly. This is a slam-

“You’re confident of that?” asked Abrams.

“100% confident. The Elections Clause is very clear. Courts around the country have been very clear about limiting executive power. You’ll recall there’s also these DOJ demands for sensitive voter data. For the data that is not public and protected for very good reasons: Social Security number, driver’s license number, dates of birth. And 30 states plus D,C. have been sued by the DOJ, including many Republican states, because they refuse to give it up. And the DOJ has lost every one of those suits that’s been heard so far, three suits, one by a Trump-appointed judge, on some similar grounds about the limits of executive power to do this absent congressional authorization. I’m 100% confident about this,” insisted Becker. “It doesn’t only violate the Constitution. There are provisions in this executive order that violate existing congressional law like the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and even law regulating the Postal Service, which doesn’t allow the president to tell the Postal Service who to deliver mail to.”

“That’s what I was gonna ask you about, you know, because it does seem like what they’re trying to do here is use the Postal Service as their cudgel, right? To basically say, you know, ‘We’re not telling states what to do, we’re just telling you how you can or can’t use the United States Postal Service,'” followed up Abrams.

“Yeah, and that’s obviously not exactly what they’re doing. They’re telling the Postal Service that they cannot, possibly with criminal liabilities is what they are trying to talk about, deliver mail ballots to people that are not on DHS’s blessed list for receiving mail ballots,” replied Becker. “Now, there is issues with DHS data, that’s well established as well. DHS has been flagging people who are citizens as non-citizens. That’s a big issue here. But putting all that aside, the president does not have the power under federal law or under the Constitution to tell the Postal Service who it can deliver mail to. That is very, very key. We wouldn’t want the president to be able to say, ‘Postal Service, you can operate fully in Texas, but you deliver no mail in California.’ That is not a power the president has. This is going to be blocked, it’s going to blocked very quickly, it’s going to have absolutely no effect on the election.”

Watch above via The Dan Abrams Show.

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